A convoy of armed jeeps packed with journalists rumbled into dusty Rafah, past razed homes and crumbling apartment complexes.
As we exited the Humvee, silence fell over a large area of southern Gaza, near the Egyptian border. Concrete slabs and twisted steel dot the scarred landscape. The kitten darted among the rubble.
The once bustling streets are now a maze of ruins. Everyone is gone.
More than a million people have fled to avoid the Israeli attack that began two months ago. Many have been repeatedly displaced and now live in tent cities stretching for miles, facing an uncertain future while mourning the loss of loved ones.
As Israel says it is winding down its operation against Hamas in Rafah, the Israeli military invites foreign journalists into the city for monitoring visits. The military said it carried out precise and restrained strikes against Hamas militants lurking in civilian areas.
But civilian death, destruction and mass displacement have left Israel increasingly diplomatically isolated.
According to Gaza’s health ministry, more than 37,000 Palestinians have died in the conflict. Although the figure does not distinguish between civilians and Hamas fighters, it includes dozens of people killed when Israel dropped two 250-pound bombs on a tent camp in Rafah in May.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put the Palestinian death toll at about 30,000 and said about half of them were civilians.
The purpose of the Israeli invasion was to destroy Hamas and free its hostages. So far, it has achieved neither.
According to military statistics, the operation has killed at least 900 members of the Rafah Hamas Brigade and a total of 15,000 Hamas fighters.
But three months after Netanyahu declared “complete victory is within reach”, the military admitted that the Rafah siege had wiped out only a third of the Hamas brigade. Hamas’s leadership remains intact. About 120 hostages are believed to remain somewhere in Gaza, but about a third are believed to be dead.
Palestinians who fled the city have no idea when they will return or what they will find when they do. Marwan Shaath, 57, said he and his family had left their three-story home. “It was meant to be a home for generations to come,” he said in an interview. His friend sent him the remaining photos. “It was badly hit. It was half down, no walls, no windows, most of it was burnt down.
Israeli officials said the fighting in Rafah was so intense that Hamas had laid hundreds of booby traps. Officials showed us a video they say shows a home outfitted with a 50-gallon drinking water tank filled with remote-controlled explosives.
On Friday, the Israeli military said it had killed dozens of Hamas fighters in Rafah, Colonel Yair Zuckerman, commander of the Nahar infantry brigade fighting in Rafah, scoffed when briefing CNN on the situation with Hamas.
“Where is the Rafah brigade commander?” he asked.
The military supervised our visit to Rafah. Although our work was not scrutinized or scrutinized by Israeli officials, we were required to remain in the convoy. Hamas representatives did not respond to text messages seeking comment.
We see the outskirts of a community torn to pieces by fighting. It became clear that Israeli forces were attacking Rafah from the south, destroying corridors of tanks and troops. The air is filled with sand and fine debris.
Artillery, fighter jets and bulldozers flattened or reduced buildings to shells. From where we stood, its scale was impossible to calculate, although it had been measured by satellites. We saw dozens of rescue trucks but were unable to assess the rescue efforts, which the United Nations criticized as woefully inadequate.
Israel accuses Hamas of using Palestinians as human shields, placing rocket launchers near schools and building tunnels under crowded neighborhoods such as Rafah.
The military showed us photos from cameras surrounding a neighborhood that officials said allowed Hamas to spy on Israeli forces and plan attacks against them. Israeli soldiers said they found Hamas combat equipment in many houses, as well as advanced weapons such as Russian-made surface-to-air missiles.
Israeli officials believe the tactic justifies fighting in sometimes crowded neighborhoods where Hamas fighters hide and conceal weapons.
But Hamas’s guerrilla tactics also reflect a power imbalance between an advanced military and militias that rely on smuggled weapons.
Israeli officials say much of the smuggling occurs at the Rafah crossing and tunnels into Egypt, not far from our location. Stopping the flow of weapons is a key reason for Israel’s operation in Rafah. Israeli officials describe these smuggling routes as Hamas’ “oxygen.”
Despite Israel’s long-standing blockade and Egypt’s campaign to stop underground smuggling, an Israeli military spokesman told CNN that soldiers had discovered tunnels along the border – he would not say how many there were. It is unclear how many tunnels were active before the war began.
“A lot of terror infrastructure is built near the border,” said Maj. Gen. Daniel Hagari, the military’s chief spokesman.
A little more than a football field from the border, the military led us to a manhole-like entrance to a tunnel between two damaged houses. Destroying these tunnels could have devastating effects on the buildings above.
“We are ordinary people living on the ground,” Mr. Shas said. “I don’t know what’s going on underground, and whatever happens, it’s not my fault as a civilian.”
More than two dozen Israeli soldiers have been killed in fighting in southern Gaza, eight of them in a bombing in Rafah last month in one of the deadliest attacks on Israeli soldiers since the Gaza ground invasion war began. While we were there, there was the occasional crackle from Israeli sniper fire.
Israeli officials have confirmed that nearly 800 soldiers have been killed since the Oct. 7 terror attack, when Hamas-led gunmen stormed into Israel, taking hostages and killing civilians, including women and children. Officials said about 1,200 people died that day.
One of them was Capt. Jonathan Steinberg, the former commanding officer of the Nahar. A few hours after his death, Colonel Zuckerman replaced him. He told us that he and his troops planned to complete their mission in Rafah.
We climbed into the jeep and drove to another nearby site to admire the views of the rest of Rafah stretching all the way to the sea. Admiral Hagari climbed to the top of a small sand dune.
He points to Tal Sultan, another neighborhood in Rafah. He said hostages were being held there. There may be a small group of Americans among them.
He said their release would require a rescue operation or military pressure.
“We will bring back the hostages,” he told us. “After October 7, any country will take the same approach.”
